SUMMARY

Alèthéia is the ancient Greek word for the unwritten poetic ways of preserving what is transmitted and remembered as truth.

The title expresses the idea of mind and memory as a hall of mirrors where the self longs for wholeness, where the truth of a person’s identity can be understood as tyhe layering of patterns and images over time and space, their being laid bare through performance and re-performance, presentation and re-presentation in the process of self-discovery and self-disclosure.

This film started as a collaborative project at California Institute of the Arts. Denis Lelong and Mariela Cadiz invested their personal interests and their creative and technical strengths in two distinctive fields, live action and computer animation, to explore the unique possibilities of the digital medium to recreate a journey through the mind.

The goal was to create 3-dimensional abstract spaces that could represent the mind’s inner dynamics. The psyche is represented as a succession of concentric spheres, each one encompassing a different state of consciousness. The feelings, thoughts, and memories of the woman in the film are the subjects of mental chemistry, flowing through these mirror-like spheres in constant processes of transformation. In these halls of mirrors there is no definite image of the self; and identity, the attempt to find a complete image of a person, is an unceasing process of motion and change.